A personal struggle to help create a world dominated by conscience rather than greed.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Bouncing Hope

Having
slightly bounced back from near-total hopelessness by grasping for
valuable lessons that could avert total catastrophe, I was once again
forced to face it.

This
week, we watched as people acting as cruel idiots (or sociopaths
playing the rest of us for idiots) engaged in what
will likely be a weeks-long act of terrorism, threatening the
health or survival of millions of people so they and their allies can
have more economic and political power.

Included
in their
demands are projects that would increase our use of fossil fuels,
such as the approval of the now-infamous
Keystone XL pipeline, which will push us much closer to
environmental disaster. The scope of that disaster was spelled out
in the latest
report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
also released this week. Already out of date, and likely too
conservative in its estimates of what's coming, the IPCC report
confirmed the urgency of rapidly reducing greenhouse gas pollution,
which is the exact opposite of what the terrorists are willing to
support.

Coincidentally,
I continued reading a new book, "Our
Political Nature" by Avi Tuschman, which explores the
underlying reasons for people's political views. The book confirms
the strong correlation of related behavior with personality type that
I've assumed in my own
research, which has a strong biological/evolutionary component.
This, and a recent
study casting doubt on people's ability to change their beliefs
based on new evidence, have led me to seriously question whether the
use of reason, facts, and ideas has any appreciable chance of
improving our odds of survival as a species.

I
had a brief interlude of renewed hope after first hearing of the
reprehensible brinksmanship in Congress. During a conversation about
these issues, I recalled the primary prescription for long-term
survival from the book "Immoderate
Greatness." Effectively, it's a version of my power vs.
responsibility theme, which I invoked as the subject of another
blog post during another national debt crisis: keep complexity
low enough to manage effectively. This time, I imagined that by
"chunking" our activities so that their effects can be
reasonably anticipated and controlled, we would cut back on
activities we couldn't, thus slowing down and scaling down our impact
on the biosphere so it has a chance to heal. We would also
potentially be happier, in large part because we'd have less stress.

Perhaps
it's my own nature which makes it easy to envision living such a
life, though my current lifestyle is far from it. I can appreciate
that other people, by their nature, might find it extremely
abhorrent, even threatening, and fight the prospect with whatever
means they can acquire – thus appearing as terrorists to the rest
of us. In an ideal world, we could live in environments where our
particular natures are an advantage, with enough capability for
migration so that opposites born in a place that doesn't work for
them can find someplace that does. Unfortunately, we don't have
that, and it's getting so crowded and interconnected that we can't
escape each other.

Toward
the end of the week, another piece of news reminded me of an option I
used to take as an article of faith. Water
was found on the surface of Mars, which makes it more attractive
as a place people could ultimately live. The prospect of exploiting
new territory and resources, with social and technological
experimentation that could potentially benefit everyone, has the
potential to improve humanity's chances of thriving and surviving
into the far future; or at least, that's how space enthusiasts
rationalize the drive to explore space. Mars is the best candidate
for our next step, and it looks even more attractive now. I still
think going to other planets is preferable to limiting ourselves to
this one, especially given the habitability
limit imposed by our warming Sun. However, the threat of
reducing Earth's habitability dramatically due
to global warming must be our top priority, along with learning
the lessons critical to ensuring healthy communities will be
developed that don't exceed the complexity they can healthily and
responsibly manage.

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About Me

Bradley Jarvis is a writer with a broad background who enjoys searching for the truth behind beliefs, and cares deeply about the future. He has written several books and created music soundtracks for two of them.